Between the Shadows and the Light
by Team Damon
Summary: After escaping Allerdale Hall and returning home to recover and pick up the pieces of her life, Edith's strange journey takes yet another unexpected and frightening turn. This one, however, might lead her to where she's always meant to be. And through it all, she won't be alone.


**A/N: Hellooooo everybody :D for those of you who follow me and got this alert, I apologize for it not being for a new chapter in Til Death Do Us Part lol. As you all know from my notes there, pregnancy was scrambling my brain and writing became not just difficult but excruciating, so everything I had in the works took a massive backseat for awhile. Then in late September I was induced, had an extremely significant and terrifying complication mid-labor and was rushed back for an emergency C-section. It was the scariest thing I've ever experienced but the good news is me and my little baby girl are okay, phew! It's been eight weeks and I'm finally feeling fully human again lol, and I am very very happy :D**

 **And now that me and baby (and my bigger kid) are on a nice little routine now, I found time to write something that has been plaguing my mind for I think about a year now. It was originally midnightwings96's idea that I added a few things to and was born of our mutual love for Crimson Peak. I truly love the movie and think it's terribly underrated, and I have many feelings about it but didn't think the story left much room for fanfiction. But that was where MW96 came in, and months and months later at 1 AM, I decided to write the thing lol. I wrote it partially to prove to myself that I can in fact still write and that my dry spell didn't ruin my brain lol, and to just get the writing juices flowing again. I can't guarantee that I'll get a new chapter of TDDUP out particularly soon, but I will try my best to get back to it ASAP and I do feel much better about my writing ability now lol. Now it's just an issue of finding the time, which I will do my best to do! In the meantime, hopefully some of you will enjoy this little thingy :) let me know what you all think, and hopefully I will see you guys soon back "home" in TDDUP! :D**

Ever since the early and sad, grief-tinged days of Edith's childhood, she had suspected that there was a great and largely ignored truth that laid beyond the "after" of death. And that was that death, frightening and unpredictable as it was, was not the hardest thing that one would ever face. Death was easy, inevitable, beyond the control of anyone that it chose to touch. Where most chose to fear death above all else due to those very reasons, Edith did not. Despite her youth, she knew one thing to be true above all else - _living_ was the true challenge.

Death would come when it pleased. Life, however, was determined by the choices one makes every single day that they drew breath. One wrong step could lead to catastrophe, and one would never know until it was too late. It could be anything - a missed appointment, a wrong turn on the street, an encounter with a dark stranger - even something as seemingly harmless as a _dance_.

Yes, life was the true great unknown. Edith had watched too many lives depart, grieved too many souls, and now that she had experienced brand new life and the miracle of it... she was yet still dwelling in death's shadow, as if it were simply her place in the world and always had been.

Maybe it was.

She had thought it impossible, laughable even, when upon her return to New York and tedious recovery from her unthinkable ordeal, Alan had mentioned a possible explanation as to some of her less easily explained symptoms. It took time for them to surface, as so many of them were explained by the poison leftover in her frail system. But once it was clear and her strength returned, as much as it ever would, her still-present nausea and fatigue pointed to something else. Something wonderful and horrible and terrible and _impossible_.

The gift of new, innocent life, growing within her and surviving against all odds. A miracle, the doctors said, and she couldn't disagree. She also wasn't sure that she could handle this latest turn that her life had taken.

Having barely escaped Allerdale Hall with her life and sanity intact, now she would carry a piece of it - of _him_ \- with her forever, a constant reminder of the man who had fallen in love with her and paid for it with his life. She could hardly fathom him, could hardly comprehend her own complicated and convoluted feelings for someone who both cruelly victimized her and yet also loved her, so how could she even begin to process what it meant to carry his child in her womb?

Alan, the kind and good soul that he was, offered to take her in and care for the child as his own. She could not accept such a generous thing, however, and stubbornly chose to live independently and raise the child without a husband. If it caused a scandal, and it surely would, she would be the very last one to care. After all that she had seen in her life, society talk was the very definition of frivolity and she no use for it. And Alan, well, she cared for him greatly and he would forever be the only one in the world to truly understand what she had endured overseas, but she could never love him the way that a wife should love a husband. And he ultimately accepted that, to her relief and his credit.

And when the baby came, it nearly perished as unexpectedly as it had come. Labor pains came early, too early, and the midwife said that the child would not live. She told her to prepare herself and even advised her to not look at the baby after birth and certainly not hold it, as it would only make it harder to let him or her go. But, Edith reasoned, the baby had already survived so much so very miraculously - who was to say that it couldn't cheat death one more time?

It was in the wee hours of the morning when William Carter Cushing was born, terribly small and blue and limp, seemingly validating everything the midwife had warned Edith of. But when Edith demanded her child to be placed in her arms, for better or worse, something happened that left the others in the room rather stunned. The baby, a boy with a head full of black hair and a will to live to match his mother's, stirred within the warmth of her arms and the familiar comfort of her heartbeat and voice, and he took his first breath without crying. In fact, as his skin shifted from deathly blue to an astonishingly healthy pink, he stayed entirely silent and opened his eyes to look up at his mother, who at that moment understood love on a level she previously never could have imagined. She smiled and laughed and kissed his little face while the midwife watched in disbelief, having never seen a baby born so early and in such distress survive somehow.

Edith was still cautioned to continue preparing for the worst, however, because the child was by no standard healthy. Though breathing on his own just fine, his lungs were full of fluid and he quickly came down with a bad case of jaundice. He was also suspected to be blind in one eye and displayed poor reflexes with his limbs, but Edith didn't care if her baby grew up with poor vision, limited mobility, or any other hardship, so long as he was alive and happy. She knew how society looked down on such people, thinking them pitiful burdens on the able-bodied majority, but that was merely yet another reason for her to spurn society altogether.

She took William - or Little Will, as she began to affectionately call him - home a week after his birth, and together they embarked on a journey that took Edith to a new phase of her strange but, as she began to believe it, blessed life.

Her Little Will was a fighter, living and growing and refusing to allow the doctors to be right about him. He was tiny and frequently sick, delayed in nearly every milestone as well, but he was strong in ways that Edith could see from the start. He was not blind, as it turned out - his striking blue eyes worked perfectly well, and were a gift from his father - but he _was_ deaf. At first Edith couldn't believe it, as it had always seemed that her voice lulled him to sleep so well, but it was because he could _feel_ her voice rather than hear it. She was sad that he would never hear music, or the sound of a bird chirping, or the sound of his own laughter, but he would never know any different. She took what comfort she could in that and accepted him for who he was, just as she always had and vowed she always would.

He was a beautiful child, his small size the only visible indication of his disabilities. Otherwise he was perfect, and to Edith's inner conflict, so very, very much like his father. She imagined Thomas himself looked just like him as a baby, adorable and bright-eyed and so very much full of potential that would never quite be realized. How the elder Sharpes could so abuse their own children was even more of a mystery now that Edith had her own little one, the idea of harm befalling him so egregious that it made her stomach turn. In her weaker, sleep-deprived moments in early motherhood, she would wonder how much different it could have all been had Lucille and Thomas suffered no abuse. Maybe Lucille's sanity never would have cracked so early in life, maybe Thomas would have been a better man, and maybe neither of them would have ever entertained the unhealthy desires that Edith had witnessed firsthand. Maybe they'd both still be alive and Thomas would still be her husband, and he would be raising Little Will alongside her.

He would have loved the boy, Edith thought. He would have been proud of him and would have so much enjoyed watching him grow up.

Little Will was a few months old when Edith began to suspect that maybe - just maybe - Thomas _was_ watching him grow up after all.

The first time it happened, it was very late at night and Will was fussing rather heartily. He was not hungry or in any other state that Edith could fix, but simply overtired and overstimulated and fighting sleep even though it was the only cure for what ailed him. Edith walked him about the room, rocking him gently in her arms and singing to him, kissing him, half-asleep herself and trying to salvage what was left of the night, but the baby was having none of it. With a sigh, she shifted him so that he was upright on her chest, cradling the back of his head with her hand as she continued to bounce him and try to soothe him, but nothing seemed to work.

Then, just when she was about to cry from exhaustion and frustration, Little Will finally stopped crying. She furrowed her brows and blinked, wondering if he'd start crying again after taking a breather, but instead he laid his head on her shoulder and remained calm. She kissed the side of his head and suddenly felt... strange. It was a sort of strange that she had felt before, but not for a long time.

She tilted her head back just far enough to see Little Will's face. His eyes were open and fixed quite firmly on something behind her, but as Edith was more than aware, there was nothing but an empty wall where he was staring.

Bracing herself, she turned to look and see for herself what her son was so enamored with. There was nothing there, however, save for what looked like a single wisp of smoke dissolving so quickly before her eyes that she couldn't be sure if it had ever been there at all.

She then looked at Little Will again. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and snuggled to her neck before falling into a blessedly deep sleep.

The second time it happened, Little Will was older by a few months and playing in his crib as Edith retrieved a pair of glasses from her own room. When she returned, she wasn't yet to the door of the nursery when she heard her baby's happy little giggles. She smiled to herself and wondered what he found so funny, then found out as soon as she reached the doorway. Her smile froze on her face when she saw the unmistakable figure standing over the crib, not scaring the child at all but rather delighting him instead.

Then she blinked and it - _he_ \- was gone. Little Will cried at his absence, and Edith later cried for entirely different reasons.

She had expected him to stay there, at home, at Allerdale Hall. He was tied there, she had thought, by pain and fear and death and his own myriad of sins that he had never atoned for. But if he was _here_ with _her_ and their _son_ , then perhaps it was because of something much more powerful than all those things combined.

 _Love_.

At first, she was angry. She didn't want him there. She didn't want him near their son, whose disabilities were a result of the injuries she never would have suffered from had Thomas not targeted her and poisoned her and been every bit as guilty as Lucille in nearly killing her. He didn't deserve to be around them, to haunt them and not allow Edith to be free of him. He deserved to be stuck back at that horrid sinking house, doomed to an eternity with his deranged sister's own ghost, trapped within the walls of the place that had so warped them during their short lives.

But as the days passed and encounters became more frequent, she found that she simply could not maintain that righteous anger. As much as she should hate him, as anyone else in her shoes would, she _couldn't_. He deserved her anger and her hate, she knew, but she didn't have the energy or the spite to keep those things alive. Not when she truly did believe with every fiber of her being that despite his flaws and his unthinkable, terrible actions, he truly had loved her and was trying to save her life when Lucille had killed him herself. And he _had_ saved her, distracting his sister long enough for Edith to kill her in self defense.

And he seemed ashamed, she began to realize as the months went on. He avoided her, never appearing in her line of sight and rarely in a room that she occupied, usually always instead appearing whenever Little Will was alone in his room. She would hear the telltale giggles and know that he was there, but the minute she approached the room, he would disappear - but never before turning her way with what was unmistakably regret and shame in his chilling eyes.

It brought Edith no pleasure to see what was left of Thomas in such pain. She wished he could be free rather than tied there, being punished in what was perhaps a sort of purgatory right in her own home. She could only imagine how unspeakably it would hurt to watch your child grow up sickly and disabled and sometimes in great pain, knowing that your actions were what caused it. And since Edith knew that Thomas had already lost one child - also due to his own terrible actions, himself and Lucille damning the child to a short and painful existence by creating it in the first place - it seemed an even crueler fate.

But Little Will knew none of this and seemed to adore the ghost that kept him company. He grew into a spirited and challenging little toddler, still terribly small and frequently ill and easily tired, preferring to crawl or drag his legs around than walk due to what doctors believed was a spinal abnormality, but he was full of life and curiosity. He loved art and would paint grand pictures with his hands on the walls of his room, something Edith allowed because he loved it so much and she loved seeing him happy. He also loved animals and, oddly enough, thunderstorms. Where most children would be afraid of thunder and lightning, he seemed to love it and would look excitedly out the window every time a new storm arrived, giggling at each new lightning bolt that struck the earth.

He was eccentric and sweet and the very center of Edith's universe. He was also Thomas' spitting image, something that never failed to make her heart ache when it would hit her how truly beautiful they both were.

She let Little Will have his father's ghost as a playmate, never discouraging him from interacting with him and also never telling him who he was. They communicated with signs made with their hands, and when Little Will gestured to where Thomas had stood only moments earlier before vanishing at Edith's arrival, he had said _friend_. Edith simply smiled and nodded, wondering if one day she would explain it to him or if he would figure it out for himself.

Meanwhile, as her baby grew up, Edith spent her free time writing a book that she didn't think many people would really want to read. But she had no choice; the words were all but tearing out of her, and the only relief she could get was to get them down on paper and out of her head. It was painful and cathartic and terrible all at once, but she never second-guessed herself. To anyone else, the book would be a work of fairly fanciful fiction, tugging at the heartstrings and scaring the wits out of the reader along the way as well. But for her, it was simply the life that she had lived until that point.

Sometimes, when Little Will was down for the night and she was locked away in her room, furiously writing the late hours away, she would feel another presence near her and know that she wasn't alone. She never looked behind her because she knew that he would just vanish, so she kept her eyes on the paper instead. Sometimes she would just keep writing, letting him watch - maybe he read over her shoulder, since he always did enjoy reading her work - and sometimes she would talk to him. She would tell him about any and everything from an annoying and too-long trip to the market, to what the doctors were saying about Little Will these days and if she believed it or not. She would talk about her hopes and dreams for him and her fears and worries too, and though there was never a verbal reply, she always felt a little less alone in those moments. Somebody loved her son as much as she did, and _yes_ , someone loved _her_ , too, though she preferred not to think about that.

She kept Thomas' presence to herself, though Alan noticed Little Will's strange attentions during his periodic visits to their home. If he suspected what was afoot, he never said a word, and Edith appreciated that. It was one of the reasons why their friendship was one she valued so much, because he respected her deeply and didn't seem to have an intrusive bone in his body. Others never noticed a thing.

Despite it all, Edith was happy and so was Little Will. Though she received looks of pity and sometimes revulsion on the street, she couldn't have been more proud of her son and being a mother was by far the most rewarding experience of her life. It was hardly easy, but no thing worth having was ever easy. She was content to raise her son at home and spend her free time writing, and when he was nearly five years old, she began writing the final chapter of her novel.

One night, as she neared the conclusion of the story at last, she heard Little Will giggling in his room and sighed to herself, taking off her glasses and stretching before heading to his room to check on him. He was supposed to be sleeping, but it wasn't unusual for him to climb out of bed and start playing until entirely too late of an hour.

She didn't brace herself anymore, because she was more than used to the sight that she would surely stumble upon. But she probably should have, because what she found brought tears to her eyes.

Little Will had a train set that was broken and had been for some time. The tracks were warped and some of the wheels had fallen off, and really it was little more than trash but anytime she tried to throw it out, he would have none of it. He still played with the broken pieces from time to time, but tonight, he wasn't playing with the train set - he was sitting on the floor and _fixing_ it, and his "friend" was silently helping guiding him in his task.

She closed her eyes and turned away from the door, trying not to think of that freezing attic and all the little toys and contraptions within it that Thomas had made as a little boy. She tried not to think about all that wasted talent and natural ability, and she certainly tried not to think about the sheer sadness of him imparting some of that knowledge to his only son despite the insurmountable barriers between them.

She decided to leave them be, quietly returning to her room and to her book. She was so close to finishing that she could nearly taste it, and with a lump in her throat and the occasional tear escaping her eye, she settled back down in front of her typewriter and wrote the final words to her story.

She wasn't sure when he had come to her room or how much time had passed, but she knew when he arrived all the same. She always did, and when it was finished - her longest and most painfully beautiful work, finished at last, she took a cleansing and tired breath and took her glasses off again, leaning back in her seat and closing her eyes for a moment.

There was something that she needed to tell him, though she wasn't sure if she could. The words were there but they felt like lead on her tongue, and she might have been crazy for needing to say them in the first place. She didn't particularly care, however, because her life thus far had hardly been a typical one and thus neither were her feelings or convictions.

She opened her eyes and, knowing that he was listening behind her, took one more deep breath before finally finding the will to tell him what she so very much needed to.

"I forgive you."

Once the words were out, that heavy feeling within vanished. She felt lighter, freer, and the sense of relief within the room was palpable. She didn't think that she was the only one who could feel it.

Then she stood up from her seat and turned around, and this time, the ghost of her husband didn't leave. He stayed, and while she wasn't sure if she would ever truly be used to his gruesome yet beautiful visage, she didn't flinch or shrink away in the slightest. His snow-white hair and yellow, unsettling eyes stood in contrast against the ever-present knife wound weeping wisps of blood on his cheek, so very different in death than how she remembered him in life.

After the shortest moment spent taking him in, not a single ounce of fear surfacing in her mind or heart, she looked him in his eerily beautiful eyes as she explained in a shaky but strong voice, "I'm not excusing you, because there's no excuse for what you did to me or the others. But I can't hate you. I've tried and I can't. And I don't want to. You've paid the price for everything you did. I don't want you to suffer anymore. So... I forgive you."

The emotion on his pale, scarred face made her eyes well up with tears all over again. She knew then that despite her forgiveness, nothing would bring his suffering to an end, not really, but... she had alleviated some of it and lifted one burden from his shoulders, and that was all that she could hope for.

Like the first time she had encountered his ghost, she reached out to touch his face one more time, cradling his cheek and wishing for just one moment that he was real and she could feel him again rather than just a cool rush of air. And just like that first time, he closed his eyes and leaned into her touch, as if he was desperate for the comfort of it and just as willing as she was to pretend for a moment that everything was okay and there was only the two of them, as they should have been but would never be.

And when she pulled her hand away, his eyes opened to meet hers one more time before he vanished into the shadows. She knew that he wasn't gone for good and that he would be back, that he was tied to her and to their son, and for the first time since she had first suspected his presence in her home, she was at peace with that fact. Her conflicted feelings and guilt over her lack of anger were no longer holding her back from forgiveness, and as a result, _she_ was finally free.

She couldn't change the past but she _could_ change her future and make peace with that terrible past. Her mother, her father, her _husband_ and every other departed soul that she had known were gone but would always be with her in ways that few others would ever believe, but that didn't matter. She had her precious little son, her passion for writing, and the strength to forgive and leave her fear and anger in the past where it belonged, in order to make room for love and happiness in the future.

Life and living was never easy, no, and love was even harder. But it was worth the struggle and pain, she knew beyond a single doubt, and her place was _not_ in death's shadow. She was in nobody and nothing's shadow, free to live and prosper and maybe find love again someday, but she would not have been the woman and mother that she was had she not been touched by death so many times. And she would not have the greatest love that she had ever known, the love of a little child who had changed her life forever and taught her things that she had never known before.

All was not as it should have been, but nothing in an imperfect world ever was. That was the dark and frightening beauty of it, she supposed, and nothing would ever change that. But wherever there was shadows there was light as well, and she was happy to dwell within the space between both.

Perhaps she had found her true place at last.


End file.
